People who fall behind don't need a slower pace. They need to move faster. That means not just more attention but longer hours. But there is only so much time. A school wanting to maximize its graduation rate needs to spend less energy on teaching people who are good at a subject in order to divert resources to those who need more. That means, counterintuitively, that kids who are good at math should be spending less time on math, not more.
It looks like a lot of people who are screaming at the end of science haven't even realized the problem may just be in their head.
In fact, math curriculum has never been made “more complex”, quite the opposite is true. Especially with recent trend of “math is racist”
Maybe it's the right thing to do, but you're not going to get a lot of support for letting the kids who are good at school go home after an hour. All the students are expected to spend the same amount of time sitting in a math class. Might as well try to have something for them to do other than throw paper airplanes after ten minutes and distract the kids who need the whole hour.
Anyway, I suggested 2x the pupils for the fast math class, so that the normal math class got more resources. If you've got smaller schools, it's harder to allocate resources, and that's understandable, but a lot of schools have enough kids to push the ratios around to get more attention to the kids that need it.
It's unnecessary for all high school graduates to have taken AP Calc; but it's a waste of students' time for those who could have made it through that not to have had the opportunity. Just like it's a waste of students' time for them to be in classes that are beyond their current level so much that they can't catch up and then just passing them because there's no alternative, so they just zone out. Admittedly, the daycare function of school doesn't really care about wasting students' time, but that's only part of the function of school.
But why? This is a very dysfunctional way of allocating teaching time, especially if the classes are not split along learning ability. What ages are we talking about here?
At my school, we didn't even get subject-specific time slots until 13/14 years: before that, we all spent the same time in class but everyone worked on their own subject. The teacher's job was to make sure that every child spent time on each subject according to their needs, not according to alotted time.
And after that, when we did get separate classes and separate teachers for the different subjects, only 70% of our school time was scheduled for the whole class; the other 30% was for teacher "open hours": the students were expected to fill that time according to their own needs.
I think you are correct, but you are pushing against the headwinds of academia.
Good students will learn complex Math, while struggling students will learn Math-I kr something simple.
That way everyone feels challenged
About two years ago I chatted with a professor at ASU who was developing AI tutors and other sorts of systems and was able to show in research papers that they enhanced the learning of the class overall. However, he claimed that adoption among teachers and schools was largely rejected because teachers hated having imbalanced knowledge among the students.
China is apparently pursuing this education strategy, though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/08/02/131198/china-squ...
Speaking as a parent with a child in private school, even there they have a strong resistance to teaching kids who already knows materials from the current year, where I was explicitly told those topics wouldn't be covered for two more years rather than embracing my child's curiosity and interests. K-12 education seems extremely non-optimal except for enabling parents to work, but my complaints about education aren't new [2] and our K-12 education certainly doesn't cultivate geniuses [3].
[1] https://slejournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40561-...
[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201107...
[3] https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-mak...
> I think that the idea is not to "dumb down" the kids, but to have a goal that everyone can achieve instead of a goal that is impossible to achieve for some of the poor kids anyway. See under this lens, the proposal makes more sense: the lectures are given at the NORMAL pace, without assuming that extra learning is made at home while it is known that this extra learning is impossible to do for some.
The NORMAL pace is too slow for some kids who aren't even doing any math at home. The solution to kids learn at different paces and some kids can learn at a faster pace if they have resources at home, but not all kids have resources at home isn't force everyone onto the normal pace. It's to make sure all kids have access to resources.
If it's hard to get resources, then maybe you can free up some by adjusting class sizes. Instead of 60 kids, and 20 kids / class room all at the same pace; you can take the 30 kids capable of doing a faster pace and put them in the fast paced room, then have two classes of 15 kids at a slower pace and now they've got more time for individual instruction, and you didn't have to hire anyone.